1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate to on-line advertising and, more particularly, to predicting the performance of such advertising.
2. Description of Related Art
An on-line advertising system may provide advertisements to users when they visit certain web pages. When a particular advertisement is of interest to a user, the user may perform various actions, such as selecting (“clicking”) the advertisement, which may take the user to a web page belonging to the advertiser associated with the advertisement. Additional examples of user actions may include signing-up for services at the target web page, placing an order, etc.
On-line advertising systems may charge the advertisers based on the number of times their advertisements are shown to users (called advertisement “impressions”) and/or based on the number of times an advertisement is selected by the users. For example, an on-line advertising system may calculate a charge based, at least in part, on the clicks that an advertisement receives. Charges may also be calculated based on other characteristics as well, such as time of day, location of the user, age or other demographic information associated with the user, or the like.
The effectiveness of an online advertisement is often reflected by the number of times that a desirable user action occurs. For example, the number of times that the advertisement is clicked by a user. Accordingly, it is desirable to display advertisements to the user having the highest likelihood of the desirable user action taking place. Conventional advertisement selection processes fail to accurately predict the likelihood that a user action relating to an advertisement will occur.